


Masha and the Piece of the Heavens

by birdthatlookslikeastick



Category: Uprooted - Naomi Novik
Genre: Other, Retelling, fairy tale, yellow cow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-29
Updated: 2016-12-29
Packaged: 2018-09-13 02:20:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9102166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/birdthatlookslikeastick/pseuds/birdthatlookslikeastick
Summary: Masha always finds her yellow cow Izabella when she wanders off into the forest - but one day, Izabella wanders a little farther than usual...





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wemighthavebeenqueens](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wemighthavebeenqueens/gifts).



Masha lived with her mother in a small Rosyan town, at the edge of the Wood.  
  
There were stories of how the Wood was once evil. Those who strayed too close were lured in, and were never seen again; those who ate the fruits of its trees or the berries of its bushes turned evil, and had to be killed, and burned.  This had stopped happening when Masha was quite young, though nobody was clear why.    
  
However, not all was well with the Wood.  People still seldom ventured into it, and sometimes those that did, such as Masha's father, did not return.  
  
Masha spent her days tending her yellow cow, Izabella, whom she loved with all her heart.  Izabella was loving in return, and the both of them liked to wander carefree through the meadows, under the bright blue sky.  Masha loved the openness of the blue summer sky more than anything; to her, it was like a window into the heavens.  She would spend hours lying on her back in a wheatgrass field, gazing up.  As such it was Izabella who had the greater wanderlust of the two; she would get lost in the edges of the Wood, and Masha would spend the long evenings calling and calling her name, her belly aching from hunger.  Masha would always find Izabella contentedly grazing on a patch of thistle or yarrow, just as the shadows were at their longest and the sun fell in the west.  Masha was always able to find her, in the end, somehow.  
  
One day, on their wanders, Masha came across a strange woman, who came out of the Wood.  Her hair was matted and brown.  She carried a rough-woven basket of heart-fruit, and wore a simple brown travelling dress, stained with mud and fruit juices, much as Masha's own dress was.  And yet despite this wildness there was such a groundedness to her; Masha immediately knew that she was to be trusted.  The woman had said she was a friend of Baba Yaga, and that the people on the other side of the Wood were good and just like them, and to come and visit her one day.    
  
She went home that evening, wondering what to say to her mother. As she was about to tell the story, she remembered her own mother's words three nights ago, at the town meeting.  "The people beyond the Wood are not like us," she had said.  "They are cold, and evil. They made the forest the evil thing that it is. Yes! the evil remains, you all know very well it has taken my husband, our husbands. Do not forget this!"  Heads had nodded around the room. So Masha kept her mouth closed as she shut the door to Izabella's stall.  
  
Months later, though, when summer had turned to fall, Izabella slipped free again and it was hours before Masha noticed.  She took a pair of fresh apples, put them in her pouch, wrapped her father's travelling cloak around her shoulders, and headed off into the borders of the Wood, calling Izabella's name.  This time, she sensed, Izabella had gone deeper than she had ever been before.  When Masha finally heard the soft tolling of her bell deep in the forest, night had fallen.  The two weary travellers lay down, huddled together for warmth, and slept a fitful sleep.  
  
In the morning, Masha awoke, hungry. She ate her apple, giving the other apple to Izabella, and found a sweet sprig of blackberries growing where Izabella had been grazing.  This deep in the Wood, she knew there was some risk that the berries had been corrupted, but these ones were plainly healthy, so she ate her fill.  She had always had the ability to find the good fruits; it was like finding the cow, she mused, munching away contentedly.  
  
The Wood folded thickly around her, all but obscuring the sky, and a chill was in the air.  Strangely, there was but one way out of the clearing: a single path wound its way through the wood, not the way she had come, but deeper in.  It was not at all as Masha had remembered it from last night, but they had to take this path - Izabella would not have been able to push through the thick brush otherwise.  
  
As the path wound through the forest, the air grew colder and colder, and the ground grew frost-covered.  Masha wrapped her cloak tightly around her, huddling close to Izabella for warmth. After a short time, the frost covering the ground gave way to snow, and then to solid ice.  It was not a natural cold.  Izabella's huffing breath condensed into great clouds, and her hooves no longer left prints in the frozen ground.    
  
Finally, the path broke into a clearing around a great heart tree.   All of the trees were bent double with ice, a half inch thick, encasing all of their branches as well as the forest floor.  Twigs, grasses, ferns and broken logs were enshrouded completely.  And lying peacefully in a ring around the heart tree, also encased in a thick layer of ice, were the missing men from the village, including Masha's father.  Masha screamed and hammered on the ice with all of her strength, but her father would not wake and the ice would not crack; there was something otherworldly and eternal about their sleep.  
  
Masha turned back the way she had come, in a panic, but before she had taken two steps she turned around and headed towards Polnya.  She had to find the woman from the Wood, the friend of Baba Yaga's.   She would know what to do.  Masha ran pell-mell, slipping and scurrying over the slick ground, Izabella following close behind.  She ran without watching the ground or sky, but as always, she knew precisely where she was going: to find the woman from the Wood.   
  
After what seemed like hours, Masha and Izabella emerged not fifty feet from a small cottage, which seemed to have grown out of the side of an enormous old oak tree. The woman from the Wood stood outside it, stacking firewood.  She looked up at Masha, surprised.  
  
"Child, what has happened?" she said.  Masha quickly tolder her the entire story: the cow, the path, her father and the villagers lying frozen in the field.  
  
"Can you find your way back to where they are?" asked the woman.  Masha nodded, curtly.  "We must go at once," she said, tying Izabella to a fence to graze.  "But first, your dress is torn to ribbons, and you must be freezing."  
  
Masha looked down at her clothes.  It was true. Her father's travelling cloak had fared well, but the dress was absolutely wrecked, from the mad dash through the blackberry vines and stiff branches.  
  
"Would you like a new dress?" asked the woman.  
  
Masha hesitated.  "Okay," she said, "but please, we must hurry, my father must be so cold. Do you even have a dress that will fit me?"  
  
The woman paused, with a half smile.  "My dear child. We are deep in the Wood, near the Spindle here, and it can help us. We can make you a new dress, together. Can you say the word ' _Vanestem_ ' with me?" she asked.    
  
" _Vanestem_ ," they said.  Masha felt a warmth within her, and the strength of the Wood-woman's magic clad her in blue walking dress, the color of the sky, with two deep pockets for her hands.  It was like a piece of the heavens, she thought, wondering.  "How did you know?" she said, in wonder.  "Did you read my mind?"  
  
The woman laughed. "No, child.  I just gave you some of my strength, so that you would not tire.  You made the dress, yourself.  Now, we must hurry; there will be more time to talk later."  The woman strode off, with Masha struggling to catch up; after a few paces, both women broke into a run.  
  
"I'm Masha," she said, breathlessly.  "What can I call you?"  
  
"Agnieszka, of the Wood," she replied.    
  
Soon enough the temperature dropped from a crisp fall day to a winter chill, and the trees closed in over them; Masha would alternately look down at her blue dress and up at Agnieszka.  "I'm bringing the sky," she thought, in that strange meditative frame of mind that comes with a long run.  "We're going to bring my father back out under the sky."  
  
Agnieszka and Masha reached the ice-entombed clearing, with all the men from Masha's village frozen in place.  Agnieszka closed her eyes, and a stillness passed over her face.  "They are still alive," she said.  She walked to the heart-tree, and stood there, silent, for what seemed like an eternity.  Masha hopped from one foot to another.  
  
"Masha," said Agnieszka suddenly.  "Can you come?"  
  
Masha, heart racing, walked to the heart tree and placed her hands on it.  She saw a whirl of images in the tree's memory, men with axes.  Then a sharp pain, the bite of an axe, and then walkers carrying the men struggling to the clearing... "Father, " she cried.  One of the men in the vision was clearly him.  And then she heard the tree speak to the Spindle, and to the heavens, and a hard rain began to fall as a chill swept through the clearing...  
  
"Father," she repeated, despairing. "My father. He didn't know. Please, tree, I can explain to them, but please let my father see the sky again."  
  
She felt, then, a warmth of understanding, and then a cracking sound, bedside her.  " _Kisara_ ," said Agnieszka softly, taking the shifting weight of the water off the branches. The ice was starting to thaw.  
  
***  
  
In a few hours, the men had thawed out and were beginning to move.  Masha embraced her father desperately, tears flowing down her face.  They built a fire from dead wood in the clearing, far from the trees, and spent the night there.    
  
In the morning they began the long trek to Dvernik, in Polnya, retrieving Izabella on the way. Agnieszka said that it would have taken days to return to Rosya.  Masha did not understand how she could have come so far into the Wood, in so little time.  
  
The men were warmly welcomed by the people in Dvernik, and plied with blankets and warm mulled wine.  Masha noticed for the first time that she did not understand the language that the people of Dvernik spoke, but it did not seem to matter. Nor did any of the men from her village, she mused, absently scratching Izabella under her chin. Agnieszka had been right: the people here were not different, or evil, or cold.  Even the danger and coldness in the Wood, she thought, might have been little more than a misunderstanding.

Agnieszka watched young Masha in her dress as blue as a piece of the heavens, and smiled.  The tree, too, had been a young one, uncorrupted by the pain of war, trying to find a new way through, without any more death and heartbreak. It had given her such hope, seeing the two of them together, that there was a path forward for their three peoples, a path of peace.

**Author's Note:**

> This is basically a retelling of the fairy tale Agnieszka Skrawek Nieba, by Natalia Gałczynska, on which Uprooted itself was based - but set in the world of Uprooted, with Agnieszka in the role of the fairy godmother, and featuring the young girl with the yellow cow. You'd think that this would be totally circular, given how many elements of the original fairy tale ended up in Uprooted, but there was an unexpected opportunity when the actual protagonist of the fairy tale appeared at the end of the book!
> 
> Now, I say "retelling", but there's a fair bit of guesswork. I wasn't able to find the original of the story (nor would it have helped me if I had, since I don't speak Polish). Luckily I did find a blog post summarizing the story, as well as a summary of a Polish made-for-tv movie based on the story, both of which translated passably enough through Google Translate. 
> 
> Also I had to change plenty of things on purpose, rather than by mistranslation. In the fairy tale, this girl's name was also Agnieszka, but that wasn't gonna work. The title is a very loose translation of the Polish, I think - except that in the original it was just "Heaven", not "The Heavens" (again, a half-hearted attempt to move things a little more into the Uprooted world, where supernatural matters beyond Magic are basically not discussed). And in the fairy tale there was an evil wizard and a sleeping spell... et cetera.
> 
> I never figured out what the name of the cow was supposed to be in the fairy tale so I made one up. It was surprisingly easy to name the cow: I just used the Fantasy Pet Cow Name generator.
> 
> http://fantasynamegenerators.com/pet-cow-names.php


End file.
